No More Mangled Wheelchairs on Brook Road

Seven years ago, Brian Montgomery was lying in a crumpled heap near the gothic stone entry gates to St. Joseph's Villa on Brook Road, his wheelchair a twisted mess of metal illuminated by car headlights.

"I was going to Wal-Mart," recalls Montgomery, a resident of Hollybrook Apartments, an independent-living apartment complex associated with the Villa. He and the complex's 60 other residents -- all wheelchair-bound  make the crossing to Wal-Mart and Kroger almost daily "for medicine or milk, bread and eggs."

"I guess they were playing with the radio or their phone," Montgomery says of the school teacher and college professor in the car that hit him. "All I remember is brakes squealing and headlights coming toward me. It threw me 15 or 20 feet in the air."

Nearly all of Montgomery's neighbors have similar harrowing tales, of being either hit or nearly hit crossing Brook Road.

But those stories may soon become distant memories. The state recently approved funding for major improvements to the road crossing. The county will finalize its own commitment on Sept. 25.